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Does anybody use Oberon for any real-world project? Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic language / operating system. I'm just wondering.
Not directly. But Nim took a lot of inspiration from Oberon/Modula for its type and module system.
> OBERON.ORG project unites projects related to programming languages Oberon, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Modula-2/3, Oberon-07 and Component Pascal (Blackbox Oberon).

Which of the Oberons? :) They are all the same with subtle differences like one having three different types of loops, and the other only two and so on.

In Russia there's a small but active group of academics who are trying to bring (force?) Blackbox as a teaching/learning environment to schools and universities.

> In Russia there's a small but active group of academics who are trying to bring (force?) Blackbox as a teaching/learning environment to schools and universities.

That's astonishing. The most recent English-language textbooks using Component Pascal are about 20 years old. Is there much newer stuff in Russian?

There are a few newer books using Component Pascal in their code or examples:

- Modern Programming from Scratch, 2011: https://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/5774402/

- Art of Algorithms, 2011: https://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/5774388/

- Computational Processes: Translation Theory, Data Management, Petri Nets, 2015: http://www.libex.ru/detail/book742088.html

- Software Development with Blackbox, 2018 (positioned as a textbook for universities): https://lanbook.com/catalog/informatika/razrabotka-programmn...

Other books are translations of the same bookss from 20 years ago you mentioned.

But the Oberon community is quite alive in Russia, and even have their own conference: https://conf.oberon.org/

Granted, these are mostly academics and people working in various state-related companies. I can't even begin to relay how bureaucratic and pompous-sounding that conference page is. "3rd scientific-industrial conference on Oberon, education on quality problems in the digital technologies", "Scientific and industry coordinators", "Program Committee", everyone is "M. Sc. PhD. Prof. Prof. Emeritus, Russian Government Education Prize Laureat" and wants darn sure you know about it: https://conf.oberon.org/about

Interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing.

Component Pascal doesn't strike me as a completely mad language to use, but Blackbox is just... old.

As it seems the Oberon IDE is missing from this list: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon#oberon-ide-features
They are accepting PRs...

https://github.com/oberon-org/site

Btw. just came across your FOSDEM talk (https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/new_type_of_computer/) which I found very interesting. Modula-2 was actually inspired by Mesa, not by Cedar (see https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1238844.1238847), and you might also be interested in this paper (concerning the implementation language of the ST VMs): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386335. Btw. a lot of good ideas from ST went into Ruby and finally Crystal which might be an adequate alternative solution for your two language (Oberon & Squeak) approach.
Oh cool -- thank you! I will study the links. :-)